27 août 2019
Annalisa Paroni et al., « Ventilatory dynamics in human beatboxing: is it similar to speech and singing? », HAL-SHS : linguistique, ID : 10670/1.hrveyq
Breathing (ventilation) constitutes the support to oral communication and human vocalisation in general. The speaker, and more so the singer, are constantly in the quest for the control between their produced sounds and their breath support. Few studies have investigated the ventilatory behaviour of speech and singing (classical singing: Salomoni et al., 2016; Thorpe et al., 2001; Thomasson & Sundberg, 1999; belting: Sundberg & Thalén, 2015) via respiratory inductive plethysmography (RIP). They have shown some differences between speech and singing, but overall the same pattern (a breath group) of a shorter inhalation followed by a longer exhalation with vocalisation.We wished to investigate the ventilatory behaviour of another artistic expression: human beatboxing. The RIP technique was used to assess the ventilatory dynamics of a beatboxer producing a same sentence in a continuum from speech to beatboxing. Our aim was to explore whether the ventilatory patterns of spoken and beatboxed sentences were similar when the beatboxed sentence results from devoicing the spoken one. Indeed the devoicing of speech to produce beatbox is a basic approach for teaching beatbox to beginners. Our data show that the ventilatory behaviour associated with beatboxing can be very different from that of speech. While speech production is associated with a continuous exhalation phase following the inhalation, beatboxing is characterised by an alternance of shallow inhalations and exhalations all along the sentence production. This makes the notion of breath group not suitable to describe the ventilatory dynamics of beatboxing. Further, because inhalations and exhalations are so rapid and frequent, the ventilatory-volume variations usually spun over a limited range. Beatboxing production is possible over a relatively long period of time without long pauses for air intake, mostly thanks to this ventilatory behaviour, but also thanks to the use of pulmonic ingressive phonation.In conclusion, the ventilatory behaviour of beatboxing appears very different from that of any other type of voice production described in the literature so far. It suggests that beatboxers do not only master articulatory agility but also master breath support for sound production.